The Geneva Graduate Institute and the Training of Diplomats in the Context of Decolonisation

In July 1969, the Central African diplomat Emmanuel Bongopassi thanked the Institut universitaire d’études du développement (IUED) — then known as the Institut africain de Genève — “for the training of men with enormous responsibilities and whose future is not yet defined”. Bongopassi had spent 11 months in Geneva and followed courses at the IUED as a Carnegie Fellow. “Your courses”, he wrote, “have instilled some of my colleagues with confidence in themselves and in the future.”

Letter from Emmanuel Bongopassi to Pierre Bungener, Director of the Institut africain de Genève. 14 July 1969. Geneva Graduate Institute Archives, “IUED 2/17. Conseil de fondation de l’Institut Africain de Genève. Séance du 19 février 1969”.

Like Bongopassi, thousands of mostly male students and interns from recently independent countries went abroad during the 1960s and 1970s for further education. In what follows, we discuss Switzerland’s and particularly Geneva’s role in what we could term the Cold War of education. For this, we turn to the history of the Geneva Graduate Institute’s predecessors, the Institut universitaire de hautes études internationales (the IUHEI, founded in 1927) and the IUED (founded in 1961).

With formal independence, governments across Africa and Asia faced the task of building up and restructuring their administrations and hiring local staff, including in the fields of diplomacy and foreign affairs. Since the colonial system had in most cases neglected the training of subject populations and invested little in education, these governments urgently needed qualified personnel. In this context, the United States and the Soviet Union engaged in an educational Cold War, hoping to win recently independent countries and their students over to their respective causes. The two superpowers used all sorts of educational tools to this end, such as scholarships, the dispatch of teachers, university exchanges, and the set-up of local academic institutions. Other countries followed and created their own offers, including Switzerland.

In the early 1950s, Switzerland was internationally isolated. It voluntarily abstained from joining international organisations, particularly the United Nations. It was also a time when Switzerland was reproached for its interpretation of neutrality during World War II, in particular for having allowed collaboration with the Axis powers. To restore its image, Switzerland sought to redefine its neutrality by adding the component of “solidarity”. Development assistance was one way of demonstrating this solidarity. It was carried out by the Service pour l’assistance technique, established in 1960 and the predecessor of the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC). SDC officials deemed Switzerland particularly suited to educating students from former colonies, because Switzerland had had no colonies of its own and, thanks to its neutrality, stood between the two blocs in the Cold War. This, it was hoped, would attract students suspicious of the two superpowers’ educational offers.

Students in the library in the villa Barton. Geneva Graduate Institute Archives, “HEI 2521/6 Photos diverses Institut 1951-1968”.

Throughout the 1960s, the IUHEI became a major academic partner of the SDC. Its director, Jacques Freymond, skilfully positioned his institution as a privileged place for the training of elites. He was convinced that science had an important role to play in the affirmation of Western values. The elites of the Third World — “impregnated” with Marxism — had now to be “reconquered”. With the support of US American philanthropic foundations, the IUHEI established a diplomatic training programme for students from the Third World. The aim was to familiarise diplomats from decolonised countries with their Western counterparts and to contribute to the creation of an international diplomatic elite that shared the same values and practices. The SDC also mandated the IUHEI to set up a school of diplomacy in Trinidad and Tobago after Eric Williams, head of the Trinidadian government and leader of the independence movement, had called on Switzerland to train his diplomats. In the framework of this cooperation, the IUHEI drafted the new institution’s statutes, defined processes of admission, elaborated curricula and even sent some of its professors to Trinidad and Tobago to teach. In the 1970s, the IUHEI would establish other schools of diplomacy in Cameroon and Kenya. In Switzerland, Jacques Freymond lobbied for the establishment of a specialised institution for the training of African elites, which led to the creation of the IUED in 1961.

The first decade of the IUED’s existence was difficult because of the diverging and sometimes contradictory interests and expectations of the parties involved in its establishment. Its main funder, the canton of Geneva, took a hands-off approach; the IUHEI considered it a complement to its own offers; the University of Geneva feared competition and sabotaged the conferral of university degrees; while SDC officials viewed the IUED with suspicion due to it being out of their control. To prove its usefulness to the SDC, the IUED organised two six-month training courses for groups of ten Nigerian diplomats in 1963 and 1965, funded by the SDC. The IUED meticulously planned the diplomats’ stay: they received training in international law by teachers from the IUHEI, followed intensive French courses and did visits all over Switzerland. However, the training of diplomats never became a priority for the IUED. Over the course of the 1960s, it reoriented its focus from African studies to development studies, forming an emerging class of development “experts”, who — at least in the case of Switzerland — would often work closely together with their diplomatic counterparts.

In conclusion, both the IUHEI and the IUED seized the opportunity to train diplomats from recently independent countries, so as to obtain funding from government and philanthropic actors and to prove their relevance to the public. Whereas the IUHEI continued this mission beyond the high period of decolonisation, the IUED focussed its activities on the development sector, viewing its older sibling as part of the system that much of its faculty criticised.  Whereas the IUHEI continued this mission beyond the high period of decolonisation, the IUED focussed its activities on the development sector, viewing its older sibling as part of the system that much of its faculty criticised. As for the students themselves, we only have fragmentary evidence regarding their experiences in Geneva. Emmanuel Bongopassi, over the course of his career, rose to the rank of ambassador. When he wrote his letter to the IUED in 1969, he quoted Marx to affirm the place of African nations in the world.